ABSTRACT
Forgiveness is often put forward as the ideal response to others’ transgressions. Yet people often fail to forgive and seek aggressive retribution instead. A likely reason underlying such preferences for revenge over forgiveness is the pleasure associated with the retaliatory act. To better understand why people find revenge rewarding, we review a body of psychological, neuroscientific, and genetic evidence to determine the ultimate and proximate functions that are served by this tendency. At an ultimate level, the pleasure of revenge can promote more egalitarian social ecologies and evolutionary fitness benefits by reinforcing retributive tendencies that deter antisocial acts. At a more proximate level, the positive affect associated with revenge serves as an emotion-regulatory tool that assuages the aversive experience of being harmed. We integrate these findings from the literature into a new affective counterbalancing model, in which the momentary pleasures of revenge set the hedonic stage that allows for forgiveness. More specifically, the aversive feelings associated with others’ provocations and transgressions can stand in the way of forgiveness, and “sweet revenge” may counteract these emotional roadblocks, allowing for forgiveness to then unfold. This generative model leads to the proposal of novel hypotheses that could advance our understanding of revenge and the failure to forgive.
